Account Executive - Acquisitions (Technical Land & Nurture)

Overview

You're selling to merchants already on Shopify (or who've expressed interest) who need more technical solutions—custom storefronts with Hydrogen, Shopify Plus features, headless commerce setups, or complex integrations. This isn't cold prospecting; you're working inbound leads and existing smaller accounts, identifying who needs to move upmarket. You'll spend your time qualifying technical requirements, running discovery to understand their stack, and positioning Shopify's more advanced capabilities.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (NYSE: SHOP)

Size: 27,000+ employees

Growth: Mature product with massive merchant base (millions of stores). Focus now is moving merchants upmarket to Plus and technical solutions.

Market Position: Category leader in e-commerce platforms. Competes with BigCommerce, Magento, and custom builds for larger merchants.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 70% Inbound - Merchants already on Shopify Basic/Standard who are outgrowing it, or hand-raisers from marketing campaigns asking about Plus/enterprise features
• 20% Internal referrals - CSMs and support flagging accounts that need technical upgrades
• 10% Strategic outreach - Targeting merchants you see doing $5M+ in revenue who should be on Plus

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDR team qualifies inbound leads and does light outreach to warm accounts. You receive leads that have shown intent or been flagged as expansion candidates.

SE Support: Shared Solutions Engineer pool. You'll have SE support for technical demos and POCs, but you need to know enough to have the initial technical discovery yourself.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: BigCommerce (mid-market), Salesforce Commerce Cloud (enterprise), Adobe/Magento (enterprise), custom headless builds, WooCommerce (SMB)

How They Differentiate: Shopify's ecosystem (apps, themes, developers), ease of use compared to enterprise platforms, global commerce capabilities (Shop Pay, Markets), and the Hydrogen framework for custom headless builds

Common Objections: "We need more customization than Shopify allows," "Plus is expensive compared to our current plan," "We're already on [competitor] and migration is a pain," "We can build custom for cheaper"

Win Themes: Speed to market, lower total cost of ownership vs enterprise platforms, developer ecosystem, proven scalability (you can point to huge brands on Shopify), unified backend for multiple storefronts/channels

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Qualifying/Discovery (35%) | Demos & POCs (25%) | Deal Management (25%) | Internal Coordination (15%)

Key Activities

• Technical Discovery Calls: You're on Zoom with a merchant's CTO or technical lead, digging into their current stack, pain points with their existing platform, custom features they've built, and what they actually need. You need to understand APIs, webhooks, and frontend frameworks enough to speak their language.

• Positioning Shopify Plus or Hydrogen: Running demos that show how Shopify handles their specific use case—multi-storefront setups, international selling, B2B alongside DTC, or building a custom React frontend with Hydrogen. You're not doing product demos from a script; you're tailoring to what they told you in discovery.

• Managing Technical POCs: Coordinating with your SE to build proof-of-concept implementations. This means project managing timelines, getting merchant dev teams access to sandbox environments, and checking in on blocker issues. POCs can drag if the merchant's team is busy.

• Navigating Internal Buying: For larger merchants, you're dealing with multiple stakeholders—marketing wants features X, dev team wants flexibility Y, finance is worried about cost. You're running multi-threaded deals, aligning everyone, and probably doing a few rounds of pricing negotiations.

• Nurturing Slower-Moving Accounts: Some merchants aren't ready to migrate yet. You're keeping them warm with content, checking in quarterly, flagging them when they hit revenue milestones that justify Plus pricing.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Technical Depth Required: You're not just selling features; you're discussing API rate limits, checkout extensibility, and headless architecture. If you're not technical or willing to learn, you'll struggle in discovery calls.

• Long, Uncertain Cycles: Migration projects are a pain for merchants. Even when they want to move, deals can stall for months while they finish their current contract, wait for a replatform budget, or get dev resources allocated. You'll have a lot of "check back next quarter" conversations.

• Internal Complexity: Shopify is huge. You'll need to know which internal team handles what, when to pull in specialists (B2B, international, etc.), and how to navigate the mothership to get answers for your merchants.

• Price Sensitivity: Shopify Plus is significantly more expensive than Basic/Standard plans. Smaller merchants balk at $2K/month even if they need the features. You'll lose deals to "we'll just stay on Standard and work around the limitations."

What Success Looks Like

• Closing 2-4 new Plus accounts per quarter (mix of migrations and upgrades)
• Maintaining a healthy pipeline of 15-20 active opportunities in various stages
• Getting technical discovery done efficiently so you're not wasting SE time on unqualified deals
• Building relationships with merchant dev teams who become champions internally

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• CTOs or VP Engineering at scaling DTC brands ($5M-50M revenue)
• E-commerce Directors at mid-market retailers moving online
• Technical founders at high-growth startups who built v1 themselves

What They Care About:

• Can Shopify handle their specific technical requirements without them having to build everything custom?
• How painful is migration from their current platform?
• Total cost of ownership—not just platform fees but dev hours, app costs, and maintenance
• Performance and scalability (can it handle Black Friday traffic spikes?)
• Flexibility to build custom experiences without being locked into templates

Requirements

• 2+ years in a technical sales role (selling to developers, engineers, or technical buyers)
• Understanding of e-commerce concepts (checkout flows, payments, inventory, fulfillment)
• Ability to discuss APIs, integrations, and technical architecture at a basic level (you don't need to code, but you need to understand what developers are talking about)
• Experience managing complex, multi-stakeholder deals
• Comfortable with long sales cycles and nurturing accounts over time
• Based in US or Canada